Down For The Chart Count: Taylor Swift 17. Australia 0

There are 17 Taylor Swift songs in this week’s ARIA Top 40. How many Aussie entries?

Zero.

If you’re keeping score at home, combining the Top 40 singles and albums, the result is:

Taylor Swift 26
Australia 2

The American star has four singles in this week’s Top 10 – twice the number of Australian Top 10 hits for the entire year so far. Just two homegrown hits have cracked the Top 10 in 2023: Flume featuring MAY-A’s Say Nothing and The Kid LAROI’s Love Again.

This week’s Top 40 singles chart features artists from five countries – the US, UK, South Korea, Canada and Nigeria – but no Australian artists. The highest-ranking Aussie entries are Vance Joy’s Riptide, which was released in 2013, at #41, and Kylie’s Padam Padam at #49. More than six months into 2023, only seven Australian singles have made the Top 40.

ARIA also has an Australian singles chart, listing the Top 20 local releases. This week’s chart features just six songs released this year. In an attempt to highlight new music, ARIA also has a Top 20 New Music Singles chart, which features only songs released in the past four months and limits entries to three per artist. But this chart is also depressing reading for Australian music fans, with just one local entry this week – Kylie’s Padam Padam at #15.

On the albums chart, Taylor Swift’s dominance of the Top 5 is broken by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, who debut at number two with the year’s longest title: PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation – their 17th Top 10 album.

The other Aussie entry in this week’s Top 40 is Rüfüs Du Sol’s live album, Live From Joshua Tree, which lands at #14.

Twenty-five Australian albums have cracked the Top 10 this year, but 22 of them exited the Top 40 the following week. Only three Top 10 albums have spent longer than one week in the Top 40 – Spacey Jane’s Here Comes Everybody (six weeks), John Farnham’s Finding The Voice soundtrack (four weeks) and The Teskey Brothers’ The Winding Way (two weeks).